February 20, 2023

POV: you are two raccoons in a trench coat, both of whom are trans

[Hello! Long time no newsletter; this has been for many reasons, but most of those reasons boil down to “My brain abruptly stopped being chill about sharing my writing with other people; existing in the world is hard right now.” My sincerest apologies.

The piece below is one I started writing roughly two years ago, which I have come back to and edited and changed and considered publishing and not published and edited some more every single time JK Rowling’s rampant transphobia has hit the news cycle. Or, to put it another way: I’ve spent a lot of time on it. I’m publishing it now because I've realized that I'm always going to feel like there's something else I need to add, some other angle or aspect I need to include, because this whole piece is about trying to pin in place the sensation of having an unwinable argument with myself; an argument that spans too much ground to ever cover entirely. I’m publishing it here instead of pitching it somewhere because even if I could get it picked up, the risk inherent in handing this particular work over to a cis editor right now just doesn’t feel worth taking. Maybe it would in a year or two, but I think I need to get this one out of the ol' mental garage.

This should go without saying but I'm saying it anyway: I’m absolutely, utterly certain that the emotional experience I’ve attempted to capture here is NOT how every trans person feels about all this, because we are not a monolith and the human experience is vast. I’m sure this won’t even be how I feel about it in a few years’ time, at least not entirely. But it is how I feel now, the conversation I’ve been having with myself over and over these last few years as I’ve watched things escalate, and I want a record of it somewhere outside my Notes app. If it speaks to you, fantastic, and if it doesn’t, fantastic. If you catch yourself trying to extrapolate this out into a treatise about how all trans people feel about all things, no you don't.

Hope you’re all as well as you can be here in hell world. Good luck out there.]

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POV: you are two raccoons in a trench coat, both of whom are trans

FIRST RACCOON: You should write something about JK Rowling.

SECOND RACCOON: Not this again.

FIRST RACCOON: You should! You should! It might —

SECOND RACCOON: I already have, man. Like seemingly every other trans person with access to the internet, I’ve already said my piece about this. Everyone has. What else is there to say, really? What hasn’t already been said?

FIRST RACCOON: But she’s doing fucked up stuff again!

SECOND RACCOON: Of course she is. Feels like that dove’s been dead twenty years.

FIRST RACCOON: So?? Don’t you feel like you have some sort of — of — obligation? To say something?

SECOND RACCOON: Oh, is that what you think? That every time a public figure does or says something transphobic I have to issue a prepared statement about it?

FIRST RACCOON: No, I didn’t mean —

SECOND RACCOON: Every time some shithead celebrity drops another big wet turd into the public conversation it’s on me to reach out to the world, is that it?

FIRST RACCOON: Well, no —

SECOND RACCOON: You think that I’m, what, the fucking Lorax of being trans? Get a grip.

FIRST RACCOON: Jesus, dude. Okay.

SECOND RACCOON:

FIRST RACCOON:

SECOND RACCOON: Sorry. Sorry, I’m being an asshole. It’s just…

FIRST RACCOON: It’s just what?

SECOND RACCOON: It’s just that you need to get a fucking grip! There are more important things going on! There’s only so much attention one hateful person deserves, no matter how many wizard books she’s written!

FIRST RACCOON: Yeah, I know, but like — she’s getting the attention either way. Isn’t it better to speak up whenever we can, wherever we can? Aren’t we supposed to make ourselves heard, or whatever?

SECOND RACCOON: First of all: what the fuck. I’m just some guy, I’m not like —

FIRST RACCOON: Immediately defensive, great start.

SECOND RACCOON: Now who’s being an asshole?

FIRST RACCOON: Takes one to know one.

SECOND RACCOON: To my point! I’m just some asshole! So are you! We’re both just the same asshole in the same huge coat — there’s nothing we can say that hadn’t already been said, far better and from a place of greater experience, or at very least from a place of experience more critical to amplify, by someone else.

FIRST RACCOON: I think that perspective is a total cop out, honestly. Just a way to excuse yourself from the responsibility to speak.

SECOND RACCOON: Well, I think your perspective is self-centered, bordering on egomaniacal!

FIRST RACCOON:

SECOND RACCOON:

FIRST RACCOON: So whatever we do is going to suck, then.

SECOND RACCOON: Yeah, pretty much.

FIRST RACCOON:

SECOND RACCOON:

FIRST RACCOON, QUIETLY: Fuck.

SECOND RACCOON: Yep. That about sums it up.

FIRST RACCOON: I mean, isn’t it enough to just exist? Like, honestly — it’s so hard to get through the world some days.

SECOND RACCOON: Yeah, sure, but —

FIRST RACCOON: Oh, don’t. Shut up. We don’t have to do that; I know it could be so much harder. It’s just frustrating to spend so much time arguing with myself over what the right thing to do is, the best way to handle it all, being conscientious of so many little points and trying to avoid saying anything that runs even the smallest risk of alienating, misrepresenting or hurting someone, when someone like Rowling —

SECOND RACCOON: Oh, here it comes.

FIRST RACCOON, PRETENDING NOT TO HAVE HEARD THIS: When someone like that can just like… say whatever fucked up stuff they’ve decided is true, on an enormous public platform, with either no concern or active malice towards a hugely marginalized group of people, and like. You know. Apparently just keep doing it, ad nauseam, forever? It’s as though I’m standing here contemplating the most ethical strategy for playing paintball while someone pours a bottomless can of Benjamin Moore Semi-Gloss over my head.

SECOND RACCOON: Yeah, but I mean — what’s the alternative? There’s only so many steps you can take down the road of caring less about other people before you start, well, caring less about other people.

FIRST RACCOON: I’m not saying I want to care less about other people. I’m saying that it’s not fair.

SECOND RACCOON: Oh, now he wants to talk about fair.

FIRST RACCOON: Well! It’s not!

SECOND RACCOON: Of course it isn’t. Who said anything was ever going to be?

FIRST RACCOON: You act like this doesn’t bother you, but I know it does.

SECOND RACCOON: I don’t act like this doesn’t bother me. I act like it’s been bothering me for such a long time that being bothered about it is part of the fabric of who I am. You act like someone who was born yesterday.

FIRST RACCOON: No I don’t! I act like I still think what I do matters —

SECOND RACCOON: But does it? I mean, does it? How many years have we been yelling about this now? Not even about trans rights at large, a much more urgent and important topic — about this single, specific author of mediocre wizard books. How many trans people have stood up and explained, shouted, cried, begged, put their tenderest and most vulnerable emotions out on display, only for things to get to this point?

FIRST RACCOON: Well…

SECOND RACCOON: I mean what, exactly, is it you think I can say? You think I can just reach out to the cis girl I knew in high school who posts pictures of her baby on Instagram in official wizard brand onesies and be like, “Hey, just so you know, JK Rowling’s steadily escalating transphobia has dramatically changed the political landscape for trans people like me and my loved ones, and is contributing to the ongoing deterioration of our human rights, and so I think your choices in baby gear are somewhat morally bankrupt?” You really think that will lead to anything productive?

FIRST RACCOON: Sometimes people surprise you.

SECOND RACCOON: Yeah, sure. Sometimes they do. But I’d rather be surprised occasionally than disappointed constantly, the way you are.

FIRST RACCOON: Ouch.

SECOND RACCOON, NOT SOUNDING IT: Sorry.

FIRST RACCOON: Ugh. Look — do me a favor and set aside all of your pessimistic bullshit for a second. What would you say, if you were going to say something?

SECOND RACCOON: To [redacted] from 10th grade?

FIRST RACCOON: No, like — generally. About Rowling. About all of it.

SECOND RACCOON:

FIRST RACCOON: Fine, don’t tell me —

SECOND RACCOON: No, shut up, I’m thinking.

FIRST RACCOON:

SECOND RACCOON:

FIRST RACCOON:

SECOND RACCOON: Well, I guess I would say that it’s certainly not about the ridiculous wizard books, or whether or not anyone liked the ridiculous wizard books, or whether or not the ridiculous wizard books are any good. I’d say it’s not even really about how much money is going into Rowling’s pocket, because she’s long since been part of the echelons of wealth where a monetary hit doesn’t really matter either way. (Whether those echelons should exist is another conversation, but since you and I are already in agreement that they should not, I'll leave it there for now.)

But some of it is about the reality that the ridiculous wizard books have been such a well known part of the zeitgeist for such a long time that they are seemingly inescapable, and everywhere they pop up — in library reading lists, in movie marathons on cable, in parents reading bedtime stories they remember from their own childhood, in what babies are wearing in Instagram posts — another line back to an active hate group is created, thin but strong, like spider silk. If a kid who knows nothing about any of this, who has just read and enjoyed one or more of the ridiculous wizard books, is assigned to do a report on an author they enjoy, and googles “JK Rowling” today? They’re going to get a lot of stories with titles like “In defense of JK Rowling,” or talking about the "trans debate” or whatever. And inside those articles they’re not only going to read the some of the transphobic things JK Rowling has said; they’re going to read those things in a framing that suggests they’re not transphobic, and that people who get pushback for saying the kind of bigoted shit she does are the real victims.

The best case scenario there — the best one!! — is that that kid is cis but has some trans people, or at some least people who are genuinely cool about trans people, in their life, and they go to those people and say, “Can we talk about this?” and are able to work through what’s really happening together. Sadly, the likeliest scenario is probably that they’re a cis kid who has never really met or heard anything much about trans people, reads after a few quick clicks that trans people are somehow ~dangerous to women’s rights~ and ~up for debate~, has no one to talk to about it who knows any better, and internalizes that rank, incorrect horseshit as something true. And the worst case scenario, obviously, is the one where they’re a trans kid who doesn’t have any trans or trans-adjacent people in their life, and they find out that the person who wrote these books they loved believes all this rank, incorrect horseshit, and they don’t have the context to know it’s rank, incorrect horseshit, so it starts them (or, horribly, continues to carry them) down the long road of hating themselves for who they are. And there’s nothing I can do or say to fix that problem!

FIRST RACCOON:

SECOND RACCOON:

FIRST RACCOON: Sorry, but — are you pausing because if I was going to be shitty about this, this would be my cue? To say, “But I love the wizard books,” or “You have to separate the art from the artist,” or “But it’s just a video game,” or something?

SECOND RACCOON: God. Yeah, maybe.

FIRST RACCOON: You know I’m not going to do that, right?

SECOND RACCOON: I do, yeah. Reflex. Sorry.

FIRST RACCOON: Forget it. I know how it is.

SECOND RACCOON: You know what the annoying thing is, though? It is just a video game. People can separate art from creator. I don’t give a shit what anyone gets up to in the privacy of their own lives; it is absolutely and categorically none of my business. But I wish… I wish people thought more, cared more, about adding threads of silk to the fucking web! To realize it doesn’t matter to the people in your life, that they don’t think enough about you to hesitate before engaging with this content in a proud and public-facing way, is a hard pill to swallow.

FIRST RACCOON: Plus, I mean…

SECOND RACCOON: Oh, obviously plus all the very relevant and unbelievably horrifying real world political shit that’s going on right now, which is a direct result of all the anti-trans fear-mongering and manufactured panic of which Rowling is a part. OBVIOUSLY that’s what really matters. I just wouldn’t say that, because the executive functioning in my brain was wired together with chewing gum and paper clips and little bits of string, and so I can’t actually remember most of the details of, for example, what is contained in which of the many anti-trans laws being considered and/or passed in state legislatures across the US. I can’t actually hold in my brain all the details of the horrible news -- of rights being rolled back, of brilliant trans lives lost to violence, of various public figures determined to vilify our existence, on and on -- and still function within the society that the people behind this news are attempting to excise me from. It’s not that I don’t want to hold onto those details; it’s that I’m so sickened and terrified by the campaign to eradicate trans people from public life, and by the ongoing, unspeakable consequences of that campaign, that my brain genuinely will not retain the bulk of the information now matter how hard I try.

Also, for obvious reasons, I am not going to be able to adequately speak to the state of trans rights and discourse in the UK, or how it feels to experience the targeted marginalization and multi-axis violence experienced by trans people of color, or that experienced specifically by trans women of color, or trans women more generally, or actually any trans experience other than being a white gay Jewish trans guy from Ohio in his thirties, because that’s what I fucking am! But the situation we’re in is one where seemingly anyone with the opinion, “I don’t care for trans people,” can stand up and say any old thing, backed up by intentionally compromised research or biased studies or just NOTHING, and most of society at large is like, “Yeah, okay. No questions. Love those wizard books.” But if someone steps up to the mic and is like, “I am a trans person, and I have on my side ethically collected and scientifically sound research, years of knowing many other trans people, years of engaging with a lot of media and art done by trans people, and living all day every day as a trans person,” well, they better have all their sources lined up, and then they better be prepared for nobody to bother to actually read those sources after they’ve painstakingly provided each one.

FIRST RACCOON: Real jaded view of humanity you’ve got there.

SECOND RACCOON: Well! Well! What do you want me to say! If I explain too little, don’t go into enough detail, I’ll be accused of being hyperbolic! But if I go into the amount of detail requested, let alone the amount actually required, then nobody wants to bother hearing all of that, and can’t I make it easy for them? But if I do make it easy for them, then they’re suspicious — if it was really as simple as the easy version (which, for the record, is, “Trans people are human beings with the same intrinsic personhood and worth as any other human being, and should thus be able to function in society just like anybody fucking else, full stop”), then why would there be all this “debate??” And then if you try to explain that there is no debate, that the very language they’re using was introduced to the public dialogue to position the existence of trans people as something it was okay to be “for” or “against,” you are once again accused of being hyperbolic! Even though, as the expression famously goes, it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

FIRST RACCOON: But —

SECOND RACCOON: Look, at a certain point you have to recognize that trying to aim between constantly moving goalposts is designed to be impossible.

FIRST RACCOON: But don’t you think —

SECOND RACCOON: God, don’t you ever let up? Don’t you feel like you’re living in some kind of — of — pocket universe or reality wormhole or something? Where you’re standing in hell, screaming, and around you there are a chorus of other voices, many of them coming from far deeper in the fires than you are, every one of them also screaming? And people are peering in through a window from another plane existence where it’s beautiful spring day, saying “Hmm. Does anyone else feel threatened by them? Because I feel threatened, I really do.” Don’t you ever despair? Don’t you ever feel hopeless?

FIRST RACCOON: Yes and no.

SECOND RACCOON: What does that mean?

FIRST RACCOON: Yes, I sometimes despair; no, I don’t ever feel hopeless.

SECOND RACCOON: Why the hell not?

FIRST RACCOON: Because I remember how being truly hopeless felt. I remember how I lived before I recognized myself, when I thought everyone else on earth had access to some manual for personhood that I’d simply never received. I remember what it was to wake every morning feeling less and less attached to my body, to my life, like I was a ghost who had been trapped in an ice sculpture which was slowly collapsing under the glare of the sun.

SECOND RACCOON: Oh, what? I mean, I remember that too, obviously, but like — is that it? You felt hopeless before so you never can again?

FIRST RACCOON: No. I felt hopeless before, and it ended. So now, when I feel hopeless — which of course I fucking do, how could I not, look at it out there — I still have solid evidence that hopelessness sometimes ends. Which leaves me with, you know. A hope. You only really need one.

SECOND RACCOON:

FIRST RACCOON: Are you crying, dude?

SECOND RACCOON: Of course not. Shut the fuck up.

FIRST RACCOON: It would be okay if —

SECOND RACCOON: I know! I know. But I’m not, so forget it.

FIRST RACCOON: Okay.

SECOND RACCOON:

FIRST RACCOON: I’m sorry I said all that stuff about — obligation, or whatever. That was shitty of me; I didn’t mean to like…

SECOND RACCOON: Suggest that being trans inherently confers some kind of moral imperative to speak up every time a public figure shows their ass?

FIRST RACCOON: Yeah.

SECOND RACCOON: It’s okay. Sometime I feel that way, too. Honestly, some days it’s hard to know what to feel.

FIRST RACCOON, SIGHING: Yeah. So what do we do now, do you think?

SECOND RACCOON: Fuck if I know. The same thing we always do, I guess — try not to let it hurt so much it keeps us from moving forward. Try to keep the people around us afloat. Try to do what we can. Try to keep going.

FIRST RACCOON: There’s this poem —

SECOND RACCOON: God, always with the fucking poems.

FIRST RACCOON: Oh, shut up. You know it’s better to feel like someone, somewhere, has twisted what hurts into something beautiful. You know that’s why people do it — poetry, art, song, whatever. Sometimes we need a map back to the place where it feels at least a little bit exquisite to be alive.

SECOND RACCOON, SIGHING: Fine. What’s the poem.

FIRST RACCOON: When I Am Among the Trees, by Mary Oliver:

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”